OH, WOW, I missed the anniversary of Woodstock. But that’s OK - I didn’t make the first concert, either.
Every erstwhile hippie has a Woodstock story. Mine is painfully brief. I was 16. My boyfriend had tickets. Our plan was to ride his motorcycle 80 miles to the concert from my suburban home and stay with some relative of a friend who lived nearby. OK, Mom?
Naturally, my mother nixed the idea. When the TV images of the mud and traffic jams started beaming in, she pointed in triumph. Aren’t you glad you’re not stuck in that? I stared at her hard, realizing, perhaps for the first time, that she was an alien presence in my world.
The orgy of retrospective that has greeted the 40th anniversary of Woodstock - not just the Ang Lee movie that opens today, but the books and box sets and endless tape loops of Jimi Hendrix torquing the national anthem - must seem like a self-indulgent nostalgia trip to today’s 16-year-olds. But they’ve internalized so much from the Woodstock-era counterculture (including the term “nostalgia trip’’) that they can’t feel its edges.
Forty years on, it’s difficult to locate the counterculture. Counter to what? In my day, it was obvious what we were rebelling against: A rigid set of societal rules. Wonder Bread and Minute Rice. Three white men telling us the news. The System. The Man. As Todd Gitlin put it in his book “The Sixties’’: “For every face of authority, there was someone to slap it.’’
Today, thanks precisely to the more open attitudes spawned by the ’60s and accelerated by the Internet, every conceivable alternative lifestyle has its own Facebook group and chat room, from living off the grid to raising feral cats to commuting by kayak. There’s no obvious counterculture because there’s no longer a single culture.
Yes, children: Forty years ago restaurants routinely refused to serve boys with long hair. Now kids from a champion lacrosse team wear flip-flops to a White House awards dinner, and hardly anyone raises a pierced eyebrow. With such permissive dress codes, it’s a lot harder to let your freak flag fly.
The Pew Research Center surveyed 1,815 people over age 16 this summer, and only 26 percent said there were strong conflicts between the generations. People still recognize a divide in attitudes, but for the most part, Pew says, “gone is the rancor between the older and younger generations that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s.’’
Some of this broad acceptance is owed to the ingenuity of corporate America, which can exploit anything that smacks of rebellion. It took years for the faded blue jeans of the ’60s to become designer denim. Today, almost nothing is so edgy that it can’t be sweetened and commoditized.
Madison Avenue is feeling groovy, selling tie-dye to beat the band. Macy’s produced a line of clothing and footwear themed to the summer of love. Even Luvs diapers got into the act, producing an ad showing babies in love beads carrying protest signs against higher-priced diapers.
“Everything we do is about the brand,’’ said Woodstock Broadcasting Network chief Gary Chetkof, without apology, in The New York Times.
Never mind that 1967, not 1969, was the Summer of Love. In many ways Woodstock marked the end of flower power, not the beginning. By 1969 paranoia was striking deep. The Weathermen blew up a townhouse. Police killed the Black Panther Fred Hampton in his bed. Drugs were overdone. The year was more Altamont than Aquarius. And Woodstock is just convenient shorthand, anyway, for a much richer and deeper series of societal changes at the turn of the decade that challenged orthodoxies and liberated all sorts of voices. It wasn’t just a concert. It was a concept.
In the end, the closest I got to Woodstock was seeing the 1970 documentary on its opening weekend instead of attending my senior prom. But it echoes still. Every time we ban a toxic chemical, vote for a woman or black man, oppose injustice, attend a gay wedding, or have our minds blown by a new way of thinking, we are strumming a distant chord from Woodstock. And that’s a legacy powerful enough to keep on trucking for another 40 years.
Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
